Evidence of Blood (6 page)

After a time, he walked back into the house, and down the short corridor to the room that had been Ray’s in high school, and which he’d long ago converted into a small, cramped office.

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, as if to keep its interior hidden from eyes Ray would not have wanted prying into his private space. There was a small desk, gunmetal gray, with an ancient black typewriter and a single reading lamp. Several cardboard filing drawers had been stacked next to it, their sides bulging with the papers Ray had stuffed inside. Homemade wooden bookshelves took up the walls’ remaining space, rising to the ceiling to make a kind of angular pit in which to house the desk. Books were stacked randomly on the shelves, bloating them out, forcing them to buckle, so packed and overburdened they looked as if they were about to snap beneath their heavy loads.

Ray had been the ultimate autodidact, the unschooled, self-educated dabbler in a hundred disparate fields. There were novels of every sort, collections of stories and literary essays, along with works of history, biography, social science, assorted titles that had struck him at the moment. Only one shelf had the look of careful organization, and that was the one devoted to Kinley’s books, each standing side by side, as if Ray had taken as much pride in them as Kinley had. One by one, Kinley took them down, read the old inscriptions he’d written year by year: To
my dear friend and fellow crime buff. To the only man whose nose remains with mine on the bloody path. To Ray, my tenth book for your fortieth year
.

When he’d read the last one, Kinley suddenly felt very tired. He walked over to the desk and slumped down in the small swivel chair. From that position, he could see a small rectangle of white paper which Ray had taped to the wall just above his typewriter. It hung in the gray shadow of the bookshelf which hung above the desk, and he had to lean forward and squint slightly in order to make out what it said. It was obviously a line which Ray had read in some kind of essay on mystery writing, an idea that had struck him so powerfully he’d actually taken the time to type it out and tape it to his wall:

Kinley studied the quotation for a moment, his mind shooting back to the train station where Ray had brought him after his grandmother’s funeral. There had been something strange in his deep green eyes that day, something Kinley had never quite forgotten. Later he had thought it might be loneliness, or family trouble, or perhaps nothing more than the sort of middle-aged despair he’d seen come and go in scores of his acquaintances. Now he wondered if Ray had been feeling something less ordinary than all that, and that if he’d looked deeper into his old friend’s eyes that day, he might have glimpsed his longing for an answer.

At Serena’s invitation Kinley rode in the first car behind the hearse, with Lois and Serena opposite him, and Ray’s sister Millie and her husband, Grady, at his side. A long serpentine procession followed along behind them, car after car in a twining line that stretched for nearly two miles up the mountainside to the spacious cemetery, where Ray was finally put to rest.

The service was longer than he’d expected, and while one of the local ministers droned on, Kinley found himself thinking again about the last time he’d seen Ray alive, his memory very vivid.

The rain had been falling in great gray sheets along the asphalt railway siding as he’d hopped aboard the northbound train. Ray had remained on the siding, looking up, his green eyes troubled, his voice tense and urgent as he’d spoken his last words before the train shuddered for an instant, then slowly, laboriously made its way forward, Ray trudging along beside it, as if intent on making a final point.

It’s hard to sleep, Kinley
.

You’ve always had trouble with that
.

How about you?

I sleep fine
.

Ray had smiled at Kinley’s reply, an eerie, discomforting smile, as if his answer had been full of secret ironies. Then the smile had vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and Ray’s face had grown very solemn again.

Except for the eyes. They’d continued to search Kinley’s face, as if looking for some code for an otherwise indecipherable text.

Kinley, are you …?

It was precisely at that moment the train had jerked ahead, moving steadily faster as Ray had stepped up his pace, trotting beside it now, as if half determined to leap aboard.

Kinley, are you …?

The train was advancing rapidly now, so that Ray was almost running to keep up with it, the rain exploding against his heavily moving body like crystal bullets, until at last, when he could no longer keep up, he’d simply stopped and watched silently as Kinley waved to him. “Bye, Ray,” he’d shouted.

But Ray had never returned that last farewell, so that, as Kinley realized now, the preacher’s voice a dull murmur in the background, their long friendship had ended with an unfinished and still unanswered question.

Kinley, are you …?

Once the funeral was over, Kinley and Serena returned to the house on Beaumont Street. Kinley took a seat in the living room, his eyes fixed on the now empty space where Ray’s coffin had rested only a few hours before.

“They’re always moving,” Serena said as she sat opposite him in the small, cramped living room. She nodded toward his hands. “Always moving.”

He pressed them down on the arms of his chair. “It’s an old habit. I’ve had it all my life.”

“It’s a grasping motion,” Serena said, “the way your hands move.” She smiled self-consciously. “I took this pop-psychology course in college. They talked about body language.” She glanced toward his hands. “What you’re always doing with them, it’s called a grasping motion.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

She shrugged. “It’s just a nervous response.”

“To what?”

She shook her head. “It was just pop-psychology. They didn’t go very far into anything.”

“I see,” Kinley said, his eyes lingering on the bare area of floor where Ray’s casket had once been.

Serena studied him a moment, as if unsure. “There’s something I have to tell you.” She hesitated. “I wasn’t going to mention it, but I think I should.”

“What is it?”

“Somebody went through Daddy’s office the afternoon he died.”

“How do you know?”

“Because when I came in the next day, it looked sort of different.”

“Messed up?”

“Just the opposite,” Serena said. “Straightened up. Everything neat and orderly, the way Daddy would never have left it.” She stopped, waited for him to respond, then continued when he didn’t. “And something else,” she said pointedly. “You know that file cabinet in his office?”

“Yes.”

“Several files were missing. Whole letters. Three of them: D, O and S. Everything in those files was gone. The folders were there, but there was nothing in them.”

“Maybe there’d never been anything in them,” Kinley told her.

Serena shook her head adamantly. “No, there had to have been.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Daddy only made a file when he had something to put in it. There’s no X or Z because he never had anything to file under those letters.”

Kinley nodded.

“And I looked at the empty folders, too,” Serena added, “the ones for D, O and S. They were stretched and cracked at the seam. I’ve worked in file cabinets long enough to know that that only happens when the files
have had things in them. Usually lots of things, not just a few pieces, enough to weight the folders down.”

“D, O, S,” Kinley said softly. “Any idea what was in them?”

“No.”

“Old cases? New ones?”

“It could have been either kind.”

“Did he file things under names or subjects?”

“Both.”

“That makes things a little complicated,” Kinley said.

Serena waved her hand. “But that’s the way he was,” she said. “Complicated. That’s why it bothers me, the missing files. They could have been about anything.”

Later that night, Kinley found it difficult to sleep, so he wandered down the corridor to Ray’s office and checked the files himself. In the yellowish light that came from the desk lamp in Ray’s cramped office, he pulled out the upper file drawer to see if any other files were missing. They were all in place, all of them but the letters Serena had mentioned. He checked the file folders and noticed all the same things Serena had. There was no doubt that a great deal of material had once been in the folders, and that all of it was gone.

For a long time, Kinley remained in Ray’s office, randomly fingering the remaining files, as if trying to soak up something of the spirit that had ruminated there, studying the crimes and misdemeanors of his native ground. They seemed almost trivial, a world of petty larcenies and family squabbles that never soared toward the dark envelope Kinley pressed against continually in his own books. How could Dottie Adair’s occasional forgeries compare with what Mildred Haskell had done to her neighbor’s son, or Old Man Adams’s public drunkenness to Colin Bright’s demonic games?

Toward midnight, still unable to sleep, he left the office and walked into the living room. The smell of the funeral
flowers lingered all around him, now sickeningly sweet, like the smell of something gone to ruin. To get away from it, he quickly pulled on his clothes and walked to his car, edging it quietly down the nightbound street so as not to disturb his less troubled neighbors.

He turned left at the end of Beaumont Street, then right again when he reached the town’s main avenue. The shops and service stations were sleeping too, lights out, shades drawn, a world that looked as if it had been abandoned by everything but silence.

On a whim, he headed up the mountain, moving slowly along its narrow path, until he reached the top, then drove on until he found himself at the cemetery again. He walked across the flat green lawn to the little mound of earth where Ray slept through his first night in the ground.

He knelt down slightly, carefully edging himself away from the recently turned earth. If he’d had a prayer, he might have said it, but his long years of trailing the Colin Brights and Fenton Norwoods of the world had stripped him of any notion that a loving, guiding hand directed anything. If there was any hand at work, he sometimes thought, it was one that should have been severed before the world completed its first spin.

Still, it seemed a time for words, and so he said the only ones he could think of, the same ones he’d said that rainy afternoon as Ray ran alongside the train: “Bye, Ray.”

He felt his fingers curl up in that grasping motion Serena had noticed, and it seemed to him that in some way they were reaching for Ray, trying to grab a few strands of his red hair and pull him up out of the clay. It was an odd sensation, more powerful than anything he’d felt in a long time, and remarkably different from what he’d felt at his grandmother’s burial. A month before, as she’d been lowered into the ground, he’d felt a curious relief. With his mother and father dead, she had been the final depository of his early history, and in a sense her own death had
completed his journey toward isolation, had released him forever from all bloodbased obligations. It was a feeling of liberation that Ray had been able to sense, Kinley remembered now, and as they’d walked out of the little cemetery together, Ray had glanced over, smiled his crooked, enigmatic smile, and said, “Well, it’s over for you, Kinley.”

Now, as he turned and walked back toward his car, Kinley found himself once again amazed at how intuitive Ray had been, and he wondered if Serena had inherited the same eerie skill, if perhaps her suspicions about the missing files were more than a distraction from her grief.

He was still considering it as he headed back along the winding mountain road that descended toward the valley. About halfway down, he stopped at the small scenic overlook the city fathers had recently erected for the benefit of Sequoyah’s occasional tourists. From the railing that lined the steep precipice, he could see all of Sequoyah, like a body lying faceup before him, its slender backbone of roofs and spires spreading for several miles up and down the valley. It had changed very little since his boyhood, and he could still remember his grandmother’s grim warnings about the kind of life that was lived there. “Not good for us,” she had always told him. If Serena were right, he thought now, perhaps it had not been very good for Ray Tindall either, and he wondered if, after so many years, Ray might pose the same question he’d asked once in Jefferson’s Drug Store:
It’s better to know, don’t you think, Kinley? No matter what the cost?